Top 6 Reasons Your Business Needs To Localize Right Now

Let’s face it – everyone wants their business to grow. Even if we work out of passion rather than for money, we still have to grow to keep the wheels turning. One of the biggest reasons businesses fail to expand and even lose sales in some instances is they completely ignore the fact that most people in the world are not native English speakers.

You really need to localize

Here’s some food for thought in this regard, specifically the top six reasons your business needs to “localize” its communications without delay:

1. No language covers your entire market at home or abroad

You might think English is enough if you target just the US. Doing so, however, would cede large market shares to your competitors. (People in this country speak over three hundred discrete languages; see Languages of the United States). The Spanish-speaking portion of the US population alone has grown from 5% to 13% in the last 20 years and English will not reach many of those individuals. Nor will it reach all of the Chinese, Tagalog, and Vietnamese-speaking groups that are also growing fast.

2. Marketing works incredibly better when done in a person’s native tongues

A recent Common Sense Advisory study showed that a whopping 72% of consumers spend most or all their Internet time browsing websites presented in their own language. Not surprisingly, the same 72% also said they would more likely buy a product if they can read or hear about it in their own language.

3. You will make more money

According to the same study, majority of consumers consider the ability to obtain information in their own language to be more important than price! Would you rather discount prices and cut your margins marketing in English or sell at full price in Spanish or French or Japanese? Exactly!

4. Avoid negative word-of-mouth

Not localizing your marketing efforts can have negative word-of-mouth effects. According to White House Office of Consumer Affairs research, a dissatisfied customer will tell between 9 and 15 people about a bad experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people. What do consumers name as the most common reason for dissatisfaction? Poor customer service! If you only serve your customers in English, you won’t do it well for whatever portion does not speak it well or at all. What’s more, most of those unhappy people will tell their friends how much your customer service sucks. Fortunately, you can avoid this easily by providing service in any language. We tell you how below.

5. Be sexy

According to Bloomberg, the fastest growing economies today are China, the Philippines, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Malaysia, Peru, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. Try entering these markets using English and you might as well just set fire to your cash. Enter using their local language and they will see you as the sexy foreign company that everyone wants to do business with.

6. You’re almost there

You’ve already painstakingly set up the business, built the product, and planned the marketing. All the components are in place. You accept credit cards, which are international. You use shipping services that can deliver everywhere in the world. You’re 99% of the way there, so why stop now? Take the last remaining step, become a multilingual business, and increase your market from local to global!

Convinced? Here’s what you need to do next.

If you’ve had experiences similar to mine, you know how tedious, slow, and expensive it is to translate anything to another language. In fact, one of the main reasons businesses have shunned localizing marketing or customer service in the past is the exorbitant time and costs involved. They chose to give up potential international growth to forego the substantial resource drain of converting everything to a foreign language.

That world has changed, however. In recent years, many new translation providers have sprung up. These firms take a customer-centric approach to helping clients become multilingual. Indeed, they find innovative ways to make communicating in just about any language quick and convenient. One pioneer in this arena is Transfluent, a company I founded in 2011. Transfluent’s mission is simple: anyone should be able to receive and send messages to anyone else in the world regardless of the languages they speak.

To accomplish this, we have connected with professional translators around the world who share our vision. As part of our network, they are available to handle any translation task you might have. To help them do this, we have added layers of software to the most commonly used communication tools to create a seamless process for localizing your messages. In short, you can post to Facebook and Twitter, you can respond to email, you can create websites or blogs in any language using your existing tools and our translation services!

What drives me and Transfluent is a passion to make the world a better, more connected place. By helping remove the language barriers that obstruct communications between businesses and consumers, we have taken a huge step toward that goal. If you are a business owner or decision maker, please take a moment to visit our website and sign up for a free, no-strings-attached consultation on your translation needs.

Find out how we can assist you in making your global communications the best they can be. Click here to begin.

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Author

Jani Penttinen

Founder and visionary with a passion to connect the world by eliminating language barriers. Jani believes anything is possible, and that giving up is not an option. He is a family man and globe-trotting artist.

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